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Christmas survival

1 December 2023

7 min read

Team Christmas and the three gifts of Christmas

How can we push past the stresses of the festive season to rediscover the magic? Roger Bretherton tells us how he learned to find joy in being on Team Christmas. Part 2 of Unwrapping God this Christmas.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

An animated scene shows a man in a Christmas jumper and a child look around a corner into something and be delighted

Arthur Christmas, Roger Bretherton's doppelgänger.

Aardman Animations.

There is one job at Christmas I always forget I have to do. It’s the one where you get the Christmas tree home only to realise that, if it isn’t going to be dead of dehydration by Christmas Eve, some chump has to saw one inch off the bottom of it. In my mind there is another version of myself who is admirably skilled and handy at things like this. That Roger- let’s call him manly-Roger- has a neatly ordered garage full of power tools ready for any task, and a set of multi-sized saws hanging outlined by a perfect silhouette on the wall. Unfortunately, this Roger- let’s call him real-Roger- does not own that garage. To give you an idea of just how chaotic our garage is, the police once woke us up at 3am to tell us it had been broken into and trashed by burglars. When I joined them in my dressing gown to inspect the ‘crime scene’, it turned out the kids had left it open, and I was forced to confess that our garage always looks like that.

So as the rest of the family disappear into the house, pinning up lights in a joyous cacophony of festive music, I’m swearing in the garage trying to find a saw. It’s usually completely inaccessible; wedged under a leaf blower, a bottle of windscreen fluid, and some discarded dumbbells which manly-Roger, were he to exist, might have actually used. Eventually I’ll emerge brandishing something completely ill-fitting for the task- some garden secateurs, a metal file, or a rusty axe, and I’ll then spend the next twenty minutes sweating over the base of the Christmas tree, thinking it all would have been much easier if real-Roger had bothered to pick up those dumbbells more than once this year. If a bad workman blames his tools, a truly abysmal workman has no clue what his tools even do. By the time I’ve finished clipping, hacking, and filing, the base of the tree looks not so much neatly sawn as gnawed-by-a-passing-beaver. I enter the house like a war hero flushed and dirtied from battle, defeatedly clutching the mangled tree. It requires every spare inch of inner resolve not to declare Christmas cancelled.

When I was a kid Christmas seemed so much easier. It was something that just happened. The festive magic occurred as if by magic. It took me longer than it should have to realise that Christmas only happens because someone makes it happen- and when you have kids and family that someone, is you. Given my incompetence with Christmas trees then, it may come as a surprise to know that I’ve learned to love being part of Team Christmas, being part of the gang who are in on the act and can make the magic happen. (And not just because our teenage sons reckons I look like Arthur Christmas in our wedding photos.) I have learned that there is, just beneath the surface, a bone-deep satisfaction in the hard work of hosting Christmas at home. It has become a spiritual discipline for me, and I should probably explain why.

We go into Christmas knowing that this year there is joy and beauty to be found in responding to other people’s demands.

Ronald Rollheiser, in his book Domestic Monastery, tells the story of a monk who followed the call to prayer deep into the solitude of the Sahara Desert. His name was Carlo Caretto, and after all his spiritual exertions and mystical extremes, he reflected that he was still no holier, no more godly, no less selfish than the mother he had left at home. His view was that the very act of raising children and constantly responding to the needs of the household had shaped her, even more effectively than the desert winds, into the attentive caring presence he had come to know. Rollheiser extends this story to us all. In the monastery, life is ordered by the monastery bell. When it rings the monks turn to prayer. Whatever they are doing – eating, speaking, half-way through a sentence – they stop and turn their attention immediately to God. Rollheiser suggests that we view the demands and interruptions of home and work just like this, as the monastery bell inviting us to turn to whatever is demanded of us in that moment. In doing so, we find ourselves shaped, like Caretto’s mother, into a more gracious and attentive form.

Christmas, more than any other time of year, has started to have a similar effect on me. When people need food or drink, when the presents need to be wrapped, when board games are needed for entertainment, when fresh air is needed to break the monotony, when someone needs to talk… I hear the sound of the monastery bell. The demands can be relentless, and easy to resent, but I have come to find some delight in willingly responding to them without a second thought.

Psychologists have written something similar about the things that motivate us towards being at our best. Self Determination Theory for example, holds that there are three basic psychological needs to which we are all intrinsically drawn. They are the conditions for feeling that what we do was initiated by us and hasn’t been imposed by the tyranny of our circumstances.

The first is autonomy. We have to feel on some level that we chose to do what we are currently doing. This is where the monastery bell can be so helpful at Christmas. We may not have chosen our families or the place of our birth, but we can choose how we respond to the obligations these things place upon us. As the guru of meaning, Viktor Frankl once said, we should not ask what the meaning of our lives is, because in the duties and demands of each day, life itself is constantly questioning us. Meaning is to be found in how we respond. Whether we are willing to do the things we have to do, as if we chose to do them. This is an intention we can set for ourselves long before the family rock up for Christmas dinner. We go into Christmas knowing that this year there is joy and beauty to be found in responding to other people’s demands. We only make ourselves miserable by imagining a world where we only ever call the shots and never have to serve them. Like the proverbial puppy, autonomy is not just for Christmas… it’s for life.

Some of our best memories of Christmas can be the conversations we had while cooking, or washing up, or serving drinks, or setting the table. If we find it difficult to ask for help, we may need to set up the request in advance.

It’s all very well claiming our intention to serve the family at Christmas, but if we don’t brace ourselves for it, it’s liable to collapse with the first person to turn down our homemade cranberry sauce (it’s a long story- see Unwrapping God this Christmas Part 1). We can choose our duty, but we don’t have to choose it alone. This speaks to our second psychological need: relatedness. We want to connect with other people, to make contact and build relationships. Doing our duty at Christmas is great, but we need to watch out for that subtle moment when our delight at serving others morphs into stomping around wishing we didn’t have to. Often this is because we ignored the moment at which we probably should have asked for help. We start to feel alone in serving and, even worse, we start mentally rehearsing all the reasons why the rest of our family are useless wasters who never lift a finger.

We need to be attentive to the pivot point at which our desire to serve turns into martyrdom, and not be seduced by the moral superiority of going it alone. If we can learn to ask those around us to help when we need it, we can create unanticipated times of connection. Some of our best memories of Christmas can be the conversations we had while cooking, or washing up, or serving drinks, or setting the table. If we find it difficult to ask for help, we may need to set up the request in advance. We let the family know that at some point during Christmas it will all feel a bit too much and we need them to be ready to help. In our house, at such times my other half has ‘permission to boss’. Given that she is more likely than me to be aware and stressed out by what needs to be done, she is free to point it out. And if, at times, that comes across a bit bossy, it’s no big deal- just Team Christmas working together to get things done.

And, if the theory is right, getting things done is the third psychological need (alongside autonomy and relatedness) that motivates positive behaviour. We like to find outlets for our competence, our skills and abilities. To listen out for the monastery bell is to ask ourselves the question: what am I able to do in this moment that would contribute to hosting the family right now? And for me, ultimately, that’s what makes the practice of Christmas a spiritual discipline. A few hundred years ago the Jesuit spiritual director, Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), grew tired of convoluted esoteric paths to spiritual enlightenment. He preferred a much more down to earth approach. He wrote: the duty of every moment is a shadow that conceals the action of God. Sometimes we miss God because we are put off by the shadow that conceals the divine presence in everyday life. But when we approach the demands of the festive season, willing to give what we have, to whomever we can, we celebrate once again this Christmas, in our own small way, the coming of heaven to earth.

Essay

Change

Digital

19 March 2024

9 min read

Time to strike a match under the social media titans

Smartphone boycotters can learn from the match girl strike and other historical protests.

Abigail Frymann Rouch

Abigail is a journalist and editor specialising in religious affairs and the arts.

A black and white image of Victorian women and a man standing together looking serious

Sarah Chapman and the match girls strike committee.

Wellcome Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Meta's assets totalled nearly US$230 billion last year; Pinterest’s were over $3.5 billion and Beijing-based ByteDance, parent company of Tik Tok, was valued at $220 billion. Between them they have attracted billions of users, and, enabled by the spread of smartphones, transformed the way that young people especially communicate, spend time alone and carry out friendships.

But parents’ concern at the impact of what their children are viewing, and the tech companies’ slow responses to a drip-drip-drip of teenage deaths linked to harmful online content, have pushed parents’ patience to the limit. In the last month an estimated 20,000 have joined a grassroots protest group – Parents United for a Smartphone-Free Childhood – whose founders are hastily developing a campaign strategy.

This pushback against the march of big tech cannot come soon enough, and if well co-ordinated it could finally give parents a weapon: their numbers.

The stats are becoming all too familiar – half of nine-year-olds own a smartphone and 68 per cent of children as young as three use it to get online. Drill down and it gets more startling: according to a Statista survey of 13-17-year-olds, 30 per cent of TikTok users had seen sexualised images or been trolled anonymously on the platform in the previous month; 14 per cent of respondents who visited YouTube had recently seen “violent or gory” content, and 10 per cent of respondents “had seen images of diet restriction on Instagram”.

But these aren’t the only forms of online harm. I attended a meeting recently in the Palace of Westminster where one speaker argued that just as bad, especially for teenagers, are the algorithms that promote content that leads to peer comparison and discontent, which niggles away at contentment and self-confidence.

The age checks on which they rely will be brought in by the tech companies, who thus far haven’t proven the most trustworthy partners on child safeguarding.

Some of these hi-tech problems will require hi-tech solutions and new laws. But might there also be some far older wisdom that could help us a society chart a course to a safer online experience for young people?

The Government’s finally passed Online Safety Bill marks a pushback, making the tech companies legally responsible for keeping children and young people safe online. It mandates platforms to protect children from “harmful or age-inappropriate” content such as porn, depictions of violence, bullying, and sites promoting anorexia, and platforms will face tougher scrutiny of the measures they take to ensure under-13s can’t have social media accounts.

However, these changes won’t take effect until part way through 2025; the age checks on which they rely will be brought in by the tech companies, who thus far haven’t proven the most trustworthy partners on child safeguarding.

What are parents to do? And increasingly, employers and economists? After all, youth mental health experts were quick to point the finger at social media following the Resolution Foundation research that found five per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds were economically inactive due to ill health last year and 34 per cent of 18 to 24s reported symptoms of mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety – a reversal from two decades ago, when they had the lowest incidence of such disorders at only 24 per cent.

The Department for Education wants heads to ban mobiles in school, which some already do. But what about outside school hours? As one participant and parent at the meeting asked, “Isn’t the genie already out of the bottle?”

Molly and Brianna were not just vulnerable teenagers – they were victims of the powerful machinery of Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions.

A couple of voices suggested young people needed an engaging real-life alternative to their screens that involved learning to take risks, such as rock-climbing. Another added that young people are too protected in the real world and not protected enough online.

One woman who has felt the sharpest cost of this inadequate protection is Esther Ghey. I would have hoped that the tech companies would be quick to change the ways their platforms work once they knew about the harmful material that her teenager Brianna was able to view online and the violent material her killers were able to discuss online.

But then I hoped the same after 14-year-old Molly Russell took her own life in 2017 having viewed content promoting self-harm and suicide on Instagram. Instead, her family were made to wait two years for Meta, parent company of Instagram, to provide evidence for her inquest. Representatives from Meta and Pinterest apologised at the inquest, five years after her death. Big deal.

Parents can – in theory – enact all parental controls offered by their internet provider, limit screen time and ban phones from their children’s bedrooms at night, although setting and reinforcing boundaries can be exhausting. Esther Ghey said Brianna’s phone usage “was a constant battle between me and her”. Other parents may lack the capacity to, or just not feel the need to, carry out such measures. And it only takes one child to share material for it to become a problem for a whole peer group.

It’s a good step that phones are entering the market that are designed to be safe for children, with parental controls and minimal access to the internet. But they don’t get kids rock-climbing (or your wholesome outdoor team activity of choice), they still normalise children’s phone use, and they require parents to spend more time monitoring their own phones to check their children’s usage.

So what’s to be done?

Molly and Brianna were not just vulnerable teenagers – they were victims of the powerful machinery of Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions, the rapid advances in tech that have taken computers from the office to the pocket and loaded them up with the capability of dozens of devices combined.

Molly’s father Ian has teamed up with Esther Ghey to work together on holding the tech companies to account. And thanks to Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood, other parents now have a way of voicing their fears in a co-ordinated way, to try to prevent the next disaster. Organisers Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell estimate that already some 20,000 people have joined, from every county across Britain. This is an online campaign for an online age: it was sparked by a post by Greenwell in the fertile soil of Instagram, and communities are organised into WhatsApp groups. Nonetheless, the pair are encouraging parents not to give children smartphones until 14 and social media access until 16, and they have put together resources to help members urge headteachers to restrict, and other parents to delay, smartphone usage.

Examples like William Booth are a reminder that, when it comes to systemic challenges, individuals are not without agency.

But what if these steps aren’t enough? History recalls some impressive David-vs-Goliath campaign victories that could be of use here. In the first Industrial Revolution, exhausted and overworked women and children lost limbs and even lives in the newly invented machinery. According to a landmark report commissioned by the House of Commons in 1832, these workers were often "abandoned from the moment that an accident occurs; their wages are stopped, no medical attendance is provided, and whatever the extent of the injury, no compensation is afforded." Years passed from the creation of these voracious machines to reformers such as Lord Shaftesbury, a politician driven by his Evangelical Christian faith, passing laws to cap children's hours at 58 hours a week and introduce other safeguards.

A few decades later, the Bryant and May match company was employing hundreds of East End women to make matches using white phosphorus, which can cause phosphorus necrosis of the jaw or Phossy Jaw. The employees formed a union and went on strike; the Salvation Army, led by William Booth, another social reformer inspired by his Christian beliefs to help people in poverty, set up their own factory in 1891 offering better working conditions including the use of less toxic red phosphorus. Although their factory only ran for 10 years, the episode spelt bad publicity for Bryant and May and a ban on the use of white phosphorus in matches followed shortly after.

A Salvation Army match box.

A yellow and red vintage match box laid out flat.

'Light in Darkest England.'

Examples like William Booth are a reminder that, when it comes to systemic challenges, individuals are not without agency. But other chapters in history underline that one person’s vision or persistence may need to be amplified by scale to be taken seriously. Had the civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, boycotted the buses alone, the authorities in Montgomery would have shrugged their shoulders. But when 40,000 other Black passengers, led by Rev Martin Luther King, joined her, the authorities could not afford to ignore them.

So how do these three stories relate to young people’s social media use?

The harmful effects of social media are a global issue, and if tech companies boast revenues greater than the GDP of several countries, governments may need to work together to get them to listen. And any calls from governments for better regulation and self-policing will be amplified if backed up by millions of parents.

Perhaps we’re seeing the start of this: if the thousands of Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood can grow in number and start conversations with schools and other parents, then the demand for smartphones and their dominance of some young people’s lives can be challenged. Such conversations can’t come soon enough. But how can parents make themselves heard? And what do nineteenth-century industrialists, East End match girls or 1950s African Americans have to do with it?

The parallel, in Christian jargon, is the undervaluing of the human person. The tech companies do not just exist to help us stay in touch with our friends or look cooler. So bear with me, if you will, for a thought exercise.

In short, and I wince: adults’ relationship with smartphones needs to be rethought just as much as children’s.

The Shaftesburies of our day need to ensure existing laws are applied, that the tech companies’ promised age controls are water-tight, and harsh penalties are applied for platforms that fail to take down harmful or illegal content. The William Booths need to provide alternatives to dopamine-inducing social media, that affirm the value of each young person and teach them to manage real-world, appropriate levels of risk. Hence the suggestion of rock-climbing or similar. And could we also imagine social network being conceived, funded and constructed on European soil which takes the wellbeing of its users seriously? And some form of online policing?

In the meantime, the Rosa Parks of our age – which is all of us social media users, and Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood could lead the way – must consider investing in a dumb phone and enacting a smartphone boycott, at least outside our professional lives. The half of nine-year-olds who reportedly own smartphones can’t buy or fund them themselves; therefore, pretty much half of parents of nine-year-olds have passed theirs on or bought new ones and kept paying the bills. That gives them leverage.

Leading by example would also mean parents swapping their own smartphones for dumbphones – at least in front of their children. An old laptop could be kept in the kitchen for searches that then become public, functional and brief – just like twentieth-century dips into the Phone Book or Yellow Pages. Smartphone ownership could be seen as a privilege of maturity like drinking, learning to drive and (previously) smoking, and doom-scrolling in front of children blacklisted. In short, and I wince: adults’ relationship with smartphones needs to be rethought just as much as children’s.

The reforms of Shaftesbury and others and the ban on white phosphorus helped lay the foundation for today’s health and safety laws. The bus boycott was a key step in the Civil Rights Movement’s long and hard-fought journey towards equality.

The tragic, needless loss of the lives of Brianna and Molly (and, sadly, others) must lead to laws and a wider social rethink that lay the foundations for a safer, more grown-up, properly regulated, internet age. We need to set ourselves on a course from where future generations will look back aghast, just as we do on child labour or white phosphorus or racial segregation, and ask, ‘What were they thinking?’